Two IMPACT funded investigators received awards at the 2024 Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) Annual Meeting held May 15th, 2024.
IMPACT Career Development Awardee and Faculty Scholar Cameron Gettel, MD, received the SAEM Early Investigator Award and Pilot Grant awardee Peter Serina, MD, MPH, received the SAEM Geriatric Emergency Medicine (AGEM) Best Fellow Abstract Award for “Standardizing nursing home to emergency department care transition form improves documentation.”
Congratulations to IMPACT executive director Jill Harrison, PhD, and executive committee member Ellen McCreedy, PhD, MPH, for receiving Brown University’s School of Public Health Dean’s Awards for Excellence in Research.
As executive director, Harrison orchestrates and participates in research collaboration with researchers and people impacted by dementia across the U.S. She received the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Collaboration.
McCreedy received the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Community Engagement. She partners with healthcare providers and entrepreneurs in the co-design and conduct of pilots and pragmatic trials of behavioral interventions to improve care for people with dementia.
IMPACT’s Laura Hanson MD, MPH, Professor of Medicine at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will assist Stacy Fisher, MD, who was recently selected as the new Scientific Advisor of The American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine (AAHPM). The positions will guide AAHPM’s efforts to advance research in hospice and palliative care and deepen its relationships with key partners in the field. In addition to research goals, the Scientific Advisor will support researcher mentoring, training and career development.
The NIA IMPACT Collaboratory held the 5th annual Business Meeting on April 2, 2024, and hosted the 3rd annual Scientific Conference on embedded Pragmatic Clinical Trials (ePCTs) in dementia care on April 3-4, 2024.
The meetings, held in Bethesda MD and via zoom for virtual attendees, were attended by more than 200 participants.
Highlights from the event include remarks from Partha Bhattacharyya, PhD, from the National Institute on Aging, a Mission Moment presented by Eric Larson, MD, MPH, a review of IMPACT’s first five years from multiple principal investigators, Vince Mor, PhD and Susan Mitchell, MD, MPH, and presentations from each of IMPACT’s ten cores and teams highlighting their accomplishments, challenges and goals for future work to further build the field.
The meeting began with a land acknowledgment reflection moment from IMPACT Design and Statistics Core leader, Heather Allore, PhD, followed by a welcome address from Vince Mor, PhD. Remarks from the National Institute on Aging were provided by IMPACT program officer, Partha Bhattacharyya, PhD.
The Mission Moment was provided by the distinguished Eric Larson, MD, MPH, a professor at University of Washington, retired executive director of Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute and vice president for research and healthcare innovation at Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of Washington, and former Leader of IMPACT’s Health Care Systems Core Dr. Larson began by reminding the group about how far the field has come in the last 60 years and called on researchers and healthcare providers to follow the Guiding Principles for Dementia Care, as described in “Meeting the Challenge of Caring for Persons Living with Dementia and Their Care Partners and Caregivers A Way Forward “ released in February 2021 from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. These principles include:
Susan Mitchell, MD MPH revisited the mission of IMPACT and the many accomplishments achieved towards fulling this mission since IMPACT was launched 5 years ago. Presentations from each of the cores and teams followed, each reviewing their initial aims as calls to action and highlighting major contributions, collaborations and ongoing priorities for the field. To commemorate these first five years of growth and accomplishment, Jo Byrne from seeyourwords created a graphical recording of the event and highlights.
This year marked IMPACT’s 3rd annual Scientific Conference on embedded Pragmatic Clinical Trials (ePCTs).
The goal of the event is to disseminate knowledge, promote research development, and engage partners to improve the care and health outcomes of people living with dementia (PLWD) and their care partners (CP). The conference provides an interactive forum for participants to present research and discuss emerging insights to improve dementia care.
This year’s conference was open to the public and featured six topic-based moderated sessions with presentations from speakers from the IMPACT community and NIA- funded researchers. Topics discussed included:
Each session included multiple presentations, followed by thoughtful panel discussions. The Scientific Conference included a poster session featuring ongoing work of 20 early to mid-career investigators selected from a national call for submissions.
View the Annual Conference page for the full agenda, conference session recordings and images from the conference.
IMPACT members Kathleen Unroe, MD, MHA, MS and Health Care Systems Scholar Gail Towsley, PhD, MS, NHA published an article in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society (JAGS). The editorial article, Learning from the experience of dementia care for nursing home residents during the pandemic, comments on an article by Gadbois et al, about nursing home care during the COVID pandemic. Unroe and Towsley comment on issues including the need for dementia care specific staff training, the value of telehealth communication, and the particular importance of expanding family roles in nursing home care. The authors describe the creation of the Moving Forward Nursing Home Quality Coalition as a response to pandemic-era policies which prevented family members from visiting nursing home residents to limit COVID transmission
